Alan MacSimóin

Make a search of all the history books you can obtain. You will find little, if any, mention of Captain Jack White after 1914. It is as if the man who had proposed the formation of the Irish Citizen Army had literally disappeared from the face of the earth when the Dublin Lockout came to an end. In fact he lived on and remained active in the socialist movement until 1940. When James Connolly was sentenced to death it was White who rushed to South Wales and tried to bring the miners out on strike in protest. For that he served three months imprisonment. In England he worked for a time with Sylvia Pankhurst's Workers Socialist Federation, and during the General Strike of 1926 he wanted to organise a Citizen Army to protect the picket lines as he had done in Dublin.

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This article opens by looking at how the meaning of communism as opposed to socialism evolved in the late nineteenth century and closes with a look at how this applies to the free software movement today. The terms socialism and communism appear in England around the 1820s as terms adopted by...

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